With one of the most important jobs in corporate America in his sights — Ford employs over 180,000 people, runs 65 plants around the world and sold a little over 6.3 million vehicles last year — what do we know about Mr. Fields? Here’s some detail from the WSJ’s coverage in recent years.

First up, the basics: Mr. Fields is 52, a native of New Jersey who studied at Rutgers University and later, Harvard Business School. After earning his MBA there, he worked for IBM, later joining Ford. Before being tapped to run the company’s North American operations in 2005, he had been running Ford’s European operations, and previously its luxury autos group, which included Volvo, Jaguar and Land Rover. Before that, he had been president of Ford affiliate Mazda Motor Corp.

His big achievement? Running the company’s North American operations through the grueling years of the financial crisis. A big part of that was helping lead a restructuring that the car maker emerged from as a profitable and growing global player, and one that hasn’t required a government bailout.

With that out of the way, here’s some more on a name you’re likely to hear plenty more of in the coming months.

As Ford this morning rolls out a sweeping restructuring plan, much attention will be paid to the plants that will be shuttered and the jobs that will be cut. But for Mr. Fields, the 44-year-old executive drafted by company Chairman and Chief Executive Officer William Clay Ford Jr. to lead the company’s second big overhaul in four years, the central challenge at Ford is fixing the company’s culture, which past and present employees describe with words like “toxic,” “cautious,” “cliquish,” and “hierarchical.”

Mr. Fields is in charge of a spiritual re-think within the company, dubbed the “Way Forward,” as Ford tries to figure out what it stands for and who its customers are and aren’t. A priority will be to protect the company’s critical base of truck buyers, while wooing more female customers with new passenger cars and crossover wagons. Ford has even given names to groups of consumers who are now uninterested in its vehicles, such as “Maxed Out,” people who attend the hottest concerts and spend more time with friends than family, or “Homesteads,” who vacation at home and watch a lot of TV.

Mr. Fields, a New Jersey native with a master’s in business from Harvard University, brings an East Coast edge to this quintessentially Midwestern company. A veteran of a successful turnaround effort at Ford’s Japanese affiliate Mazda Motor Corp. and an unfinished one at Ford’s European operations, Mr. Fields says Ford’s previous North American restructuring plan, launched in 2002, “erred on the side of being a bit too polite.”

As a newcomer with a mandate to shake things up, politeness was not a priority: soon after taking the job, a showroom employee asked him if workers should be worries about their pensions. ”Yes, yes, you should,” he replied. “That’s a great motivator.”

Why so blunt? ”I decided this was a chance to get people moving; to get away from the ‘this too shall pass’ mindset we’ve had,” Mr. Fields told the WSJ at the time.

A Costly CommuterAs Ford was making a series of tough decisions in 2006-07, including cutting tens of thousands of jobs, Mr. Fields was criticized by some in the company for enjoying an expensive perk. From April, 2007:

Mr. Fields, the chief of Ford’s North American business, had been criticized by employees, dealers and others for the use of the company jet, which cost the auto maker $214,479 for the fourth quarter of 2005, the one period Ford had previously disclosed. In January of this year, Mr. Fields announced he was giving up the perk, which allowed his free use of the company plane to fly home to south Florida from Detroit on weekends.

He will still get free trips home, but will have to fly commercial. As previously disclosed, the company has agreed to pay the costs, including first-class airfare, for personal travel to and from Mr. Fields’s home, and continues to provide tax relief as a result of the imputed income from the arrangement. His total compensation was valued at $5.6 million, which included $101,807 in tax reimbursements.

He gave up the perk in January, 2007, but defended use of the company plane in an interview at the Detroit Auto Show that year. “My commitment is to leading a turnaround in Ford North America,” he said. “As part of that, I am using my compensation plan for what’s best for my family.”

Mr. Fields, 51 years old, who has been widely seen as the likely successor to Mr. Mulally, takes on his new duties Dec. 1. Mr. Fields led the company’s North American downsizing, which closed 16 plants and cut more than 39,000 employees, and is credited with helping the company avoid the bankruptcy restructurings that befell its U.S. rivals in 2009.

In his new role, Mr. Fields now must deal with another downsizing. Ford last month said it would close three plants to stem losses in Europe that are expected to reach about $3 billion over two years. The restructuring aims to return Ford’s European operations to profitability by mid-decade amid a sharp decline in new-car salesacross Europe that isn’t expected to be reversed soon. The moves will reduce its operating costs by $500 million in the next two years.

In the past year, Mr. Fields has made his influence felt at Ford mostly by running the company’s business-plan review meetings, held every Thursday.

These meetings are “core to changing the culture at Ford,” Mr. Fields said. In an interview early this year at the Detroit auto show, he said he hoped the meetings, a tradition Mr. Mulally brought from Boeing when he joined Ford in 2006, would become a permanent fixture.

During the sessions, which have been cited for opening up the flow of information, bosses from various areas of Ford give status updates, assigning their projects a color: green for go; yellow for concerns and red for stop. The idea wasn’t initially a hit, because Ford executives didn’t want to admit problems. Mr. Fields is credited with being the first to buy into it.

Gary Johnson, who runs Ford’s Asia-Pacific manufacturing, said Mr. Fields, then head of North American operations, sent ripples through the company in an early meeting when he disclosed that the launch of the Ford Edge SUV was off-track. “Edge is red,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview in China in April, recalling the meeting. “I’ll never forget it. In the old days, if you said that, you were a dead man walking.”

Mr. Mulally, however, rewarded Mr. Fields with applause and other company executives quickly fell in line.

Comments (4 of 4)

I really admire this guy in business terms, such versatile views on Ford , is like that is his own business. That is the spirit of Mark Fields keep it up.

2:09 pm April 22, 2014

@Christy wrote:

Yeah, because he is intelligent, saved Ford during the financial crisis along with the thousands of jobs that go along, and has a plan to continue Ford's success, he's a complete d*ck. Sounds like you have an axe to grind.

10:27 am April 22, 2014

christy anderson wrote:

He sounds like a complete d*ck. I don't think I'm looking forward to this.

6:17 pm April 21, 2014

Anonymous wrote:

I wonder if he'll do as well as fellow HBS grad Rick Wagner did at GM? Hmmmm....